Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 179-186
Author(s):  
Damien B. Schlarb
Keyword(s):  
Apple Tree ◽  
Spiritual Belief ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
Religious Doubt ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Spiritual Crisis ◽  
Biblical Language

This chapter steps back from the critical discussions of the previous chapters to contemplate the bigger picture of Melville’s wisdom project as a response to the condition of modernity. It intersperses brief excursions on Clarel and “The Apple-Tree Table” to show that Melville deemed the spiritual crisis of his day an inescapable conflict, but one that could be weathered while holding on to at least some kind of spiritual belief. Wisdom represented for Melville the best strategic guide to surviving this crisis, and the wisdom books, this chapter contends, helped Melville engage the Bible constructively rather than antagonistically. Literature for Melville is a space in which religious doubt, critical inquiry, and biblical language and philosophy may be juxtaposed, contemplated, and moderated, so as to avoid radical suspicion and skepticism.

The Book of Judith in the Context of Twentieth-Century Studies of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toni Craven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
Critical Editions ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Book Of Judith ◽  
Second Period ◽  
Collaborative Alliances

Studies of Judith represent three overlapping but distinct periods of critical inquiry. Interests were awakened (1913-49), as three firsts in English wit ness: Charles's comprehensive APOT (1913), Oesterley's two one-volume introdutions to the Apocrypha (1914, 1935) and Pfeiffer's critical introduc tion (1949). In a second period (1950-85), Judith's context undergoes remarkable shifts both within the Bible and the wider community with the inclusion of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books in translations like the RSV and NRSV, text-critical editions, literary analysis, initial feminist studies, and collaborative alliances of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish scholars. In a third period (1986-2001), critical strategies enlarge to represent increas ingly gender-inclusive, interdisciplinary, international and eclectic concerns.

Julian of Norwich, the Bible, and creative, orthodox theology: always novel, never new

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-325
Author(s):  
Thomas Andrew Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Julian Of Norwich ◽  
The State ◽  
Considerable Time ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Orthodox Theology ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Biblical Texts

AbstractScholars have spent considerable time attempting to characterise Julian of Norwich's relationship to biblical texts. This article will first survey the state of scholarship with respect to Julian and the Bible, defending a minimalist thesis: that Julian thinks theologically in the rhythms of scripture, rendering suggestions that she haphazardly borrows from biblical language demonstrably false. Subsequently, literary-critical readings of biblical texts echoed in the parable of the lord and servant will be deployed to show how Julian echoes not only the language of the Bible, but also its themes, narratives and theology. By highlighting a particular kind of imaginative theology that is nevertheless deeply biblical, the article argues that Julian is at once creative and orthodox: always novel, but never new.

‘A Double Face of False and True’

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-77
Author(s):  
Michael O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Poetic Vision

Chapter 3 traces the movements of Shelley’s ideas and attitudes toward religion throughout his life and writings. It views Shelley as a far more nuanced religious thinker than is often implied by critics. It identifies the ambivalence with which Shelley, a self-styled atheist, approaches religious belief—especially Christian modes of belief—and the ways in which Shelley wrestles with and subverts the boundaries between the secular and the religious. The chapter examines how Shelley’s imagination adapts the language of religious belief in order to articulate poetic vision and experience. It traces many of Shelley’s allusions to the Bible and identifies the ways in which Shelley ‘incessantly reorchestrate[s]’ Biblical language in his works. It identifies the treatment of religion in other Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Blake, and shows how Shelley’s poetry departs from their approaches to religion. The chapter also probes a recurring idea in Shelley’s poetry and writings that there is some power or spirit that affects human souls, that originates within or, just possibly, beyond humanity, and has characteristics that influence and are influenced by poets. For Shelley, poetry is religion and poets are prophets and seekers of truth. The chapter also discusses Shelley’s religious prose and the ways in which his writings about God, belief, and religion ‘[reveal] a double rhythm’ in which Shelley ranges from scientific examination to ‘eruptions of latent feeling’. The chapter concludes with a study of Shelley’s final poem, the unfinished Triumph of Life, showing that throughout the poem there ghosts a ‘Christian belief-system that is never wholly abandoned or forgotten’.

The Beginnings of a Critical Reading of the Pentateuch

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-142
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Ska
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reading ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of

This essay presents a brief history of critical inquiry into the origin of the Pentateuch, whether to Mosaic authorship or to the idea of unified authorship in any sense, as well as into whether the Pentateuch, or the Bible more generally, is to be taken as “true” in a literal sense. It covers ground from Origen to Spinoza, and presents the background to later, and all modern, critical engagement with the text.

On the Eirobiblical

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 469-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Cooper Harriss
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Considerable Distance ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Canonical Text ◽  
Biblical Language

The Bible (as it tends to do) supported both the justification of and resistance to American slavery as it was practiced in the antebellum era. Slaveholders and abolitionists alike “re-wrote” the Bible, attempting to bolster the legitimacy of their respective sides. Most scholarly treatments of these biblical interpretations discuss the myriad ways that agents (ranging from the nominally literate to the literary) deploy generally stable readings and reinscriptions of biblical passages as they apply to their contemporary circumstances. Enslaved Americans, however, tended to encounter the Bible orally/aurally as illiterate people, hearing it performed at second- or third-hand and assimilating its language and stories at considerable distance from the canonical “text.” Furthermore, most examples we possess of this language reside in contested documents narrated by the enslaved to problematic scribes. This essay explores how the enslaved wielded the inherent imprecision of their biblical language to articulate coherent, if ironic, biblical worldviews. Assessing the rhetorical and even semiotic distinctions between these two modes of biblical interpretation, I develop a category (“eirobiblical rhetoric”) that facilitates critical engagement with the instabilities that result from such rhetoric as it engages particularly with the political and social exigencies of a religiously ordered (and “justified”) system of chattel slavery. A series of close readings in the 1831 document The Confessions of Nat Turner, an exemplary text of eirobiblical rhetoric, allow for the critical application of this new rhetorical category in a way that offers an unprecedented and liberating interpretation of a troublesome and disputed text.


The Bible: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Riches
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Language

The Bible: A Very Short Introduction explore the material, cultural, and religious history of the Bible. The Bible is both one of the most read and the most influential books in the world. Its stories form the heart of Western civilization, while biblical language is interwoven into literature and everyday speech. As a source of shared Abrahamic beliefs, it has both drawn communities together and given them new life and fuelled bitter disputes. This VSI examines how the books of the Bible have been read and interpreted by different communities across the centuries, including post-colonial and feminist readings of the Bible. It also surveys the Bible’s role in art, music, poetry, and politics.

“Monkeying with the Bible”: Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Bryan Bademan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American English ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Language

AbstractDevotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the history of the Bible in America: the public reception of University of Chicago professor Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation (1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization.

scholarly journals “When Noah built the ark…”

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Pihlaja
Keyword(s):  
Metaphorical Language ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Language Analysis ◽  
Explicit Reference ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Biblical Texts

Abstract This article investigates the use of biblical stories and text in the preaching of Joshua Feuerstein, a popular Facebook evangelist, and focuses on how biblical stories are used to position the viewer in comparison to biblical characters and texts. Taking a discourse dynamics approach (Cameron & Maslen, 2010), a corpus of 8 short videos (17 minutes 34 seconds) and their comments (2,295) taken from the Facebook are analysed first, for the presence of metaphorical language and stories taken from the Bible. Second, they are analysed for the role of metaphor in the narrative positioning (Bamberg, 1997) of the viewer, particularly as it relates to Gibbs’s notion of ‘allegorises’, or the ‘allegoric impulse’ (Gibbs, 2011). The corresponding text comments from the videos are then also analysed for the presence of the same biblical metaphor, focusing on how commenters interact with the metaphor and Feuerstein’s positioning of them. Findings show that biblical metaphorical language is used to position viewers and their struggles in the context of larger storylines that compare everyday experiences to biblical texts. This comparison can happen both in explicit narrative positioning of viewers with explicit reference to the Bible, and implicit positioning, through the use of unmarked biblical language. Analysis of viewer comments shows that use of metaphorical language is successful in building a sense of camaraderie and shared belief among the viewer and Feuerstein, as well as viewers with one another.

scholarly journals Shakespeare and the Bible

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2 (1)) ◽  
pp. 113-115
Author(s):  
Sona Seferyan
Keyword(s):  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Allusions ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Made In

In the Armenian reality the translations of Shakespeare’s works have been studied from diverse perspectives – text equivalence, choice of words, fidelity to style and poeticism. The Armenian classical translator Hovhannes Massehian was the first who investigated the imagery of the original and Biblical allusions. He revealed the Biblical language of Shakespeare and used Armenian equivalents in his interpretations. The most successful translations of 12 Shakespearean works by Massehyan confirm the invaluable contribution that the Armenian translator made in the history of the art of translation in Armenia.

Triumph in the Churches

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Locke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Bible Belt ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Spiritual Crisis ◽  
Religious Colleges

Decades of denominational construction and consolidation transformed Texas religion. Churches grew, ambition flourished, money flowed, and religious colleges and newspapers abounded. Denominational leaders had assembled the raw materials of the Bible Belt, and, at the turn of the twentieth century, labored to awaken within their congregations and their clergy the spirit of political activism. The postwar spiritual crisis still plagued anxious evangelicals, but clerical leaders complained that too many clergymen and too many congregations refused to act. Flush with visions of clerical empowerment and preaching the power of a new prohibition gospel, a clerical insurgency set out to conquer pulpits, congregations, and communities all across Texas.

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